Tag Archives: PubMed

PubMed Commons, the pilot commenting system for authors in PubMed announces a new feature: Journal Clubs. By allowing participants (researchers, physicians, and trainees) to share views on methods, interpret results, and discuss how publications fit into their own research, PubMed Commons Journal Clubs encourage global engagement on scholarly literature through face to face meetings and on social media platforms.

University of Vermont Professor Gary Ward (Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics) is a member of an external group providing feedback for PubMed Commons. He believes these journal clubs have the ability to offer more to the scientific community.

Journal club accounts are open to those discussing research literature in graduate, post graduate, and continuing professional education, and applicants need to be supported by members who participate in group discussions. The journal club, according to the PubMed Commons Team, “can represent a major intellectual investment – and a long-standing form of post-publication evaluation.” For more information on PubMed Journals, please head over to the PubMed Commons Blog.

From the National Library of Medicine, PubMed Health “offers up-to-date information on diseases, conditions, drugs, treatment options, and healthy living, with a special focus on comparative effectiveness research from institutions around the world. PubMed Health is produced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.”

While it is similar to MedlinePlus, the comprehensive database of consumer health information from the NLM, PubMed Health offers more information regarding comparative effectiveness research of treatments. For a more detailed analysis of the differences between the two products, see this newsletter article from the Vanderbilt University’s Eskind Biomedical Library.

Images published in journal articles deposited in PubMed Central can now be viewed and searched through the new NCBI Images Database. The database allows searches in many fields, including author, caption text, image size and date. Images may be used in accordance with the authors’ original copyright agreements with the journal articles’ publishers. So far the database includes 3 million images.

These images also appear in PubMed for those articles that have been deposited in PubMed Central. Clicking on the title for an article in PubMed brings up a record that includes an image strip. For more information, see this article from the NLM Technical Bulletin.